Blue Arabesque

by Patricia Hampl

  For Delacroix the experience of radical beauty in Morocco was apparently decisive. He didn’t repeat it—he never returned to North Africa. Perhaps like Matisse, once back home in his slippers, he was transported from geography to the terrain of the imagination, to the act of painting itself. The overpowering experience of beauty in Morocco and Algeria during those intense months of 1832 provided Delacroix with all he needed. It had been, he said later with exquisite discretion, “a pleasure that one might well wish to experience only once in one’s life.”

  Just so, in the fall of 1913, when Matisse was about to embark upon another much-anticipated painting trip to Tangier, he suddenly held back and decided to stay in his Paris studio. “I would probably astonish you,” he wrote a friend who assumed he was off to Morocco, “if I told you that I have made plans to spend a few months in Paris . . . thinking that I had, for the time being, to engage in an effort of concentration and that the trip, the change of climate and the excitement provoked by things new, which at first touch us primarily by their picturesqueness, would lead me to dispersion.”

  The moral: Stay at home in your slippers.

  …

  THE TOURIST—that notoriously debased, denigrated bourgeois type—how easy to forget that simply being elsewhere is the homely version of the transcendence sought by artists. The sheer vacancy of tourism, hanging out, no job, day free to sniff around, poking into a museum in the morning, long lunch eating something weird and delicious—friture d’anchois, glass of white wine, humbled by a phrase book, meandering down a borgo toward awnings that seem to beckon, coffee at a wobbly table, world going by, the frank time-wasting of it all, eye as innocent in all this strangeness as when it first blinked upon the world—isn’t that the point of being a person crammed into a charter flight, off to an unknown land with nothing but curiosity for an agenda? To look. For the goal of the tourist is the same as the artist’s: to bring back pictures.

  True, money is essential to travel, and tourism can be colonialism lite. The great consuming white mouth open and munching—and carefully not seeing what its contentment requires it to disregard.

  Yet under the banging templates of exploitation and consumption, the magma of human desire keeps bubbling. The hunger for wonder is appeased by nothing as it is satisfied by travel. Moving around, being a stranger in a strange land, a located and limited “I” turned into an uncertain anonymous “eye,” going to Paris to write about Michigan, then home to America to write about having been in Paris—this is how it is in the hunting-and-gathering civilization that is artistic endeavor.

  Artists have always traveled, if only to the Louvre to copy the work of the past, entering the alien landscape of time’s reversal, scratching at the door of its mysteries. So self-regarding is modernity that it tends to see everything as leading up to . . . itself. Matisse the wild beast; Picasso the iconoclast. They “break” with the past, they “change forever” the course of painting, they “lead to”—us. But in fact, they worshipped and worried over the past because that was where the evidence of greatness was displayed.

  Matisse found his first encouragement for his work not in willful rebellion, but when he found a hero in the past. On a visit home to Bohain in Picardy from Paris, he and his father—the classic I-don’t-get-it Dad—traveled to the provincial capital of Lille, the father to the weekly seed market, the son to see the Goyas in the museum. “He was desperate,” according to his son Pierre Matisse, the legendary New York art dealer, recounting a cherished family story. “He couldn’t understand the academic method, a touch of gray, then a darker tone, all their tricks and dodges—and then there was Goya. He said: ‘Ah, that I can do.’”

  Matisse went for years to the galleries of the Louvre, spending long hours, copying, tracing the hand of the masters, trying to get back there. He didn’t wake up one morning thinking, I don’t need all this; I can paint any way I want. As a student of the École des Beaux-Arts he knew himself to be a failure. “I believed I would never be able to paint because I didn’t paint like the others,” he said later in life. He could not absorb the academic technique in which “the sun of the Levant,” as Pierre Schneider, the great Matisse scholar, puts it, “is drenched in the brown gravy of the École.”

  Travel, for an artist, wonderfully strips away professionalism, the “tricks and dodges” of the studio, the sheen of technique, the bombast of theory. The sketch is all you have, the mind’s quick takes, making glancing marks in the notebook. The same applies to writers, as Henry James, in The Art of Fiction, says in his expansive, throatclearing way. He attests to his faith in “the rich Principle of the note”: “If one was to undertake to tell tales and to report with truth on the human scene,” he says, “it could but be because notes had been from the cradle the ineluctable consequence of one’s greatest inward energy . . . to take them was as natural as to look, to think, to feel, to recognize, to remember.”

  Impossible to lug around the grand designs of ambition in the almost weightless knapsack of first perceptions. Delacroix, too, set great store in the sketch: he felt a painter should be able to finish a drawing of a man falling from a building’s fifth story before the man hit the ground.

  Perhaps this affirms a core belief in classical technique, but it sounds modern—catching reality on the fly, being present in the glimpse, the fleeting instant. But getting it. The artist as tourist is the artist freed of the fuss, fuss, fix, fix, touch of gray, then a darker tone. It is not only the exotic subjects—the women lounging on their divans, the hills the color of a lion’s skin—that thrill the eye of the touring painter. The hand is enchanted, too, liberated from the easel, loosed to crayon, chalk, the pencil’s smudge. The writer freed of plot, “character development,” “narrative arc,” hand roving over the notebook page in sentence fragments, broken images, the butterflies of observation pinned down, the bright flowers of attention pressed between the damp pages.

  Religion, that other ancient enterprise of the imagination, is magnetized by travel as well. Even defined by it. Islam marks its start from migration—the original great march from Medina to Mecca. This hajj, repeated as a form of religious confirmation every year, is one of the five pillars of Islam. Not to mention the forty years of desert wandering that established Judaism, and the homeless meandering of Jesus: “Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” Pilgrimage, which is a form of tourism, reaffirms humanity’s most ancient metaphor—that life is a journey. We must keep moving, it seems. The imagination is not a domestic animal. It roams, it picks up scraps where it can. A piece of paper, a stub of pencil.

  Matisse came to see the airplane as the ultimate means of transport, “the flying carpet of The Thousand and One Nights,” as he put it. To him, flight was tourism absolute— abstracted from effort, without the earnestness of pilgrimage—experience without episode, an entirely lyric journey, pure form, travel as the float of sheer verticality. After a flight from London to Paris that astonished him, he wrote, “You find yourself in a completely white landscape, in radiant but not blinding light.” Not the unhelpful “blinding light” of Algeria in 1906, but the timeless radiance of air, the very thing that had originally caused him to take the ferry to North Africa to begin with: light.

  “The forms of the clouds are extremely pleasant,” he says, a nineteenth-century man for whom a plane ride is magical. “Vast plains heightened by plumes of clouds seem to block the route. We come closer and then penetrate them in silent fog and diffused light. We emerge, the noise of the plane grows louder and once again we find ourselves abruptly in the bright, caressing light (a light not only bright but delectable).”

  The whole experience was revelatory. “A plane trip,” he said, as of a different state of being, “can help us both to forget and to find the peace of mind which makes everything possible. What is surprising is the feeling of motionlessness and of great security. It seems impossible that we could fall.” He had ascended into light, hi
s enduring subject.

  A man given to discoveries—of light, color, shape—he discovered flight, which was not wholly or even essentially physical to him, when, as an old man, he experienced this miracle only imagined and dreamed of in the Golden Age. “Shouldn’t one complete a young man’s education,” he wrote lavishly after this flight, “by sending him on a world tour, mostly by plane?”

  Travel, maybe especially the surface ease of tourism, promotes the art of the sketch, of the note, forms that retain the pulse of the eye that beholds, the hand that transcribes, the intimate self that absorbs and then renders. Travel alerts the eye and humbles the hand. Its final destination is radiance: to be transported, as the mystics say. The world’s transparent window finally opens wide. And the subject sketched in the notebook—goldfish, Moroccan screen, a father gesturing to his boy before a painting of a languorous woman in a gallery of the Louvre as another woman takes it down—all of it is not subject. It is window; it is eye.

  THREE

  Divan

  Doesn’t everything start at home? Especially the desire to escape it. Then, having escaped, to live in a permanent elegy, drawing from the well of your own hard-hearted ambition and proud rejections all the refused tendernesses, all the provincial complacencies you determined to abandon. And did abandon.

  All my heroes—my saints, as I think of them—have been traitors, one way or another, to their homeplace: Matisse fleeing the priest-ridden north; Scott Fitzgerald shrugging off his (and my) likewise Catholic St. Paul; Katherine Mansfield abandoning Edwardian New Zealand for the London literary life. All of them were drawn at some key point, as if by divining rod, past their initial flight, to the aquamarine rim of the Mediterranean, to the sun and the ancient source of Western culture. They sought, if unconsciously, the place where it all began. “It” being nothing less than civilization, the human impulse that organizes itself to express what it means to exist, face torched by the sun, ear filled with the rhythm of the waves, eye gorging on the gallons of light that gush over the lavender fields of Provence.

  This sun-and-civilization was not Matisse’s birthright. He was born on the last day of 1869 in Picardy, bordering Flanders, in northeastern France, near Van Gogh country. Sugar beet land, the hardscrabble Minnesota/North Dakota of France. A dour provincial world. Just a month before his birth the Suez Canal opened for commercial traffic, one of the signal events of nineteenth-century empire and colonial marketeering. With its opening, the Orient, the Levant, all the treasure-lands of the East drew nearer.

  The new canal was a variation on the Progress/ Transportation theme that had echoes elsewhere. Earlier the same year the first transcontinental railroad was completed in the United States, linking east and west. (Which would not have been cause for celebration for Delacroix who before his death in 1863 remarked, “Soon we shall be unable to go five miles without coming across those fiendish contraptions, railway trains.”) In these historic linkages—grand canals and continental railroads—nineteenth-century colonialism gestures toward postmodern globalism, the culmination to which its raw spirit aspired.

  Matisse grew up not only on the border of Flanders, but on the raw edge of this industrialism. The air of his boyhood town, Bohain, was grimed; the streets ran with effluent from factories that, in a generation, changed a centuries-old village of home jacquard weavers into a town of day laborers at big factories. Blake’s dark Satanic mills sucked up the lives of his neighbors, men, women, and children who worked twelve hours a day in the beet-processing refineries and the textile mills of the town with a single fifteen-minute break. Belching smokestacks punctuated a landscape once marked by windmills and steeples.

  There was also political humiliation: As a boy, Matisse experienced the occupation of his town by the Germans, following the mortifying French defeat of 1871. This shame occasioned an impassioned invitation from the Catholic archbishop of Algiers (formerly bishop of Nancy). “Christian people . . . now on the roads of France, of Switzerland and Belgium, fleeing your burning homes, your devastated fields,” the Archbishop writes in an ecclesiastic letter, “Algeria, African France, by my Bishop’s voice, opens its doors and offers you its arm. Here you will find for yourselves, your children and your families, abundant lands, more fertile than those that you left behind in the hands of the invader.” In other words, overcome the humiliation of the invader by becoming the invader yourself.

  Yet for all the bleak misery of Bohain, luxury was its chief occupation, beauty the business surrounding Matisse as he grew up. Bohain supplied the great couture houses of Paris with the stuff of fantasy: the gossamer fabrics shot with threaded gold, fine linens and patterned wool challis, handwoven velvets, filmy tulles and voiles, vividly dyed silks, watered and figured, cream-heavy and feathery-frail. The many textile factories of the town were almost all devoted to the high fashion and furnishing houses of Paris. “Picardy, thanks to Bohain,” according to an admiring government inspector in an 1897 report, “leads the whole of France and indeed the rest of the world, in the fashion field.”

  Matisse never forgot that he was a provincial of the north—the cold, gray, hard-bitten, unforgiving Catholic north. Toward the end of his life, while he was working on the chapel at Vence in sunny Provence, Matisse told the movie star Edward G. Robinson, who was one of his collectors, “I’ve always worked like a drunken brute trying to kick the door down.” Spoken like the boy still smarting from provincial humiliations, determined to crash the party. That is, the galleries.

  When the time came to break away from home, Matisse did not stop at Paris, where of course ambition required him to migrate. As soon as he had some money in his pocket (actually, before he had any), he kept going south, to the sun, to the light. Years later, as an old man long resident in Nice, he still sounded like an escapee from winter as only a northlander can: “When it became clear to me,” he said, “that I would see this light every morning, I could not believe my bliss.” It was a grand inner homecoming to the “great dazzlement” (“mon grand émerveillement”) he had felt at his first sight of the Mediterranean in 1898. You would think he had discovered the sun. In a way, he had. The sun in things, not just the sun falling upon them.

  “NICE IS ALL DÉCOR, a very beautiful, fragile town but a town without people, without depth,” Matisse wrote of the city he chose as his main residence for the rest of his life. It became his odalisque capital. But maybe Nice, a place that was “all décor,” “without people,” and especially “without depth,” answered perfectly the description of the real estate he required.

  Here, in rented rooms and apartments between 1917 and 1929, he decorated his elaborate hotel-harems as stage sets for the most intimate paintings of his long working life. But are these draped and undraped houris really “intimate”? Debate has rocked back and forth concerning the value and purpose of Matisse’s preoccupation with the hieratic figures he propped up in the bewildering visual cross-purposes of his wallpapered and carpeted, striped and beflowered pocket Edens. The little moment in the Chicago Art Institute when my art history major friend told me the odalisques were “the really important paintings” and then laughed her knowing feminist laugh about the harem—this was only one of the political minefields Matisse’s girls had to endure as they lounged through the century.

  Are these works a signal of mere indulgence, nothing more substantial than “decoration”? A kind of regression and retreat? Or do they display a radical passion, a fever for color and body and sensuous life (the East) as against tone and intellect and rational thought (the West)? Are they bold or bourgeois? Aggressive or passive? The work of genius or a retreat from greatness? Voyeuristic or contemplative? Imperially possessive or revelatory visions of the act of seeing, the poetry of pure attention?

  Long ago I succumbed to Matisse and his studio project. I’ve shadowed him—and his odalisques—from museum to museum in my travels since that day at the Chicago Art Institute when I gazed at the woman gazing at the goldfish. I’ve stalked his girls as if
they had secret intelligence about the life of the mind. That’s the odd part—that these luscious bodies would suggest to me “the life of the mind.” Gallery after gallery, over the years, I’ve made my pilgrimage to these sightings of the cool-eyed woman with her faux exoticism, my stack of museum shop postcards growing like a boy’s deck of baseball cards.

  In Paris, great troves of Matisse girls, of course. In Nice yet more. In Baltimore I discovered the amazing cache of loungers, harried by their flowered wallpapers and Moorish screens, in the Cone Collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art. They had been collected by two sisters, Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta Cone, inspired pack rats of modern art, virtuosos of avidity. They collected everything, it seems—including, like Matisse, textiles. “I am beginning the buying all over again,” Dr. Claribel writes to a friend with dismay at her own passion. “How the saris wind themselves about my heart. ‘Throat’ would be better, for they strangle out all other impulses. . . . Now that I stop to reason about it, it is silly foolishness, this collecting of things. But it must have some solid foundation—some foundation deep in the hearts of people. . . . It is the craving for beauty that is such a vital function of the human soul.”

  I even find a Matisse odalisque near home, in Minneapolis—the Odalisque with Bowl of Fruit (1925). The Minneapolis odalisque sits cross-legged, one bare foot crushing a carpet rose, her chemise open to the waist, her ripe breasts demurely covered with a filigree of embroidery, her eyes boldly set ahead. The odalisque face, typically, is composed of several sure strokes, and looks straight out from a looping, zigzagging environment, not a dreamy face at all, but almost stalwart, at attention. The odalisque as stern sensualist. Maybe that’s why I persist in thinking these figures convey something about the life of the mind even as their breasts loll, and their patterned world swirls about them, and everything seems to invite indolence and ease. They suggest not languor but the act of perception, the self meeting the world—looking at it, as the world looks back from the vast neutrality of its material wealth.